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Instagram’s Co-Founders Said to Step Down from Company

nytimes.com

221–230 of 231 posts

Re: Instagram’s Co-Founders Said to Step Down from Company

#221
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 90% of the posts are garbage spam that takes the form of meme/image mace hybrid abominations designed to get likes. IG is like twitter in that the more effort you put in to curate the people you follow, the more rewarding your timeline is. I never look at Explore, but I look at the pictures in my own timeline and enjoy them.

Have you ever really thought about the feed you get from Twitter? It's a jumbled mess of insight, humor, flaming and trolling. The context switching required to jump from comedians to programmers to politicians to pundits is EXHAUSTING. The thing that Twitter most needs is some way to find and sort by topic or category. And I haven't been able to find any resource to help me find accounts like the ones I most enjoy.…

> Do you know any way to find accounts with high signal-to-noise ratios that might align with other, known accounts?

Just follow a small set of people. When those people retweet interesting stuff from other people, follow them too.

Re: Instagram’s Co-Founders Said to Step Down from Company

#222
post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those two goals are only separated by about a decade of normal work, which is not even much more time than it takes to bring a startup to an exit. If you can put 1-2.5M dollars into investments you can pull safe returns of enough to live on indefinitely and never need to work again. Making >$200k a year and being frugal it is not that hard to put together 1-2.5 million dollars in capital. At 10 years of 250k with a 4…

You're completely missing the point. > being frugal ... 30k in annual expenses Requires budgeting and is a bit of a standard of living lower than most people would prefer. Especially if they got kids. Plus how you going to live in SV on $30,000 a year when rent alone is that much? > 7% average returns So requiring those 10 years are during a bull market. There's a big difference between "work at a startup for a good…

>Plus how you going to live in SV on $30,000 a year when rent alone is that much?

By working for one of the companies that offers:

* a shuttle (so you don't need a car)

* food perks

* a phone

And if you're taking the shuttle you can live in cheaper areas or select the cheapest areas available and/or live with roommates. You can get below $24k/yr on rent and easily live on a $6k/yr or $500/mo budget.

Re: Instagram’s Co-Founders Said to Step Down from Company

#223
post #38
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, can they not BUY the next one? It's what they did with Instagram after all. >What future revenue streams does Facebook have? The amount of Data facebook has on the behavioral nature of current parents and current and future American children of said parents is _insane_. Facebook may not be a social media company for ever, but big blue will be an advertising powerhouse for a while with the amount of data they…

What like the next social network? I'm much more bearish on antitrust than most people throwing that term around, but even I am against Facebook being able to buy another upstart social network. They cannot be allowed to do that. Maybe they can do something completely different like Oculus and leverage their infrastructure to make the best product possible. But even then that's a huge gamble, and I don't think Oculus…

>and I don't think Oculus has lived up to anywhere near the hype.

Don't speak too soon, Gaming PC VR was never ever going to be big but they're announcing their first full featured stand alone headset today.

In terms of what Oculus is hoping to achieve today is pretty much Day 1 and everything up until today has been a beta test.

Re: Instagram’s Co-Founders Said to Step Down from Company

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. They probably had some sort of golden handcuffs with FB, a vesting period? 2. How often do you get to experience the thrill of leading one of the fastest growing and most popular apps of all time? That's a lot of power and prestige, you're basically a real world rockstar. Why leave while the missile is still going upwards to space at full speed, even just for the experience? It's an exhilarating ride, I'm sure, an…

I think you have to step back and wonder what "growth at all cost" can turn into. Multiple research studies have confirmed Instagram, relative to other social media apps, has basically been engineered to maximize FOMO and is making people more depressed, isolated, feeling "not good enough", and in a constant cycle of comparison with others. When you create an app that is as consequential as Instagram is on society/cu…

I was an early instagram adopter and have definitely felt my feelings change to it over the last 2 years. It's gone from being excited to check my feed to a sense of dread.

Used to be something I'd do up to 10 times a day, now sometimes once a week and when I do I often intentionally avoid the feeds and just search for specific people I want to see because I don't want to see what a lot of people I follow that I know IRL are doing.

Re: Instagram’s Co-Founders Said to Step Down from Company

#225
post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those two goals are only separated by about a decade of normal work, which is not even much more time than it takes to bring a startup to an exit. If you can put 1-2.5M dollars into investments you can pull safe returns of enough to live on indefinitely and never need to work again. Making >$200k a year and being frugal it is not that hard to put together 1-2.5 million dollars in capital. At 10 years of 250k with a 4…

You're completely missing the point. > being frugal ... 30k in annual expenses Requires budgeting and is a bit of a standard of living lower than most people would prefer. Especially if they got kids. Plus how you going to live in SV on $30,000 a year when rent alone is that much? > 7% average returns So requiring those 10 years are during a bull market. There's a big difference between "work at a startup for a good…

> > 7% average returns

> So requiring those 10 years are during a bull market.

If your bull market includes the 2008 crash, then yes.

"The last decade provided an average return of 6.88% in the stock market. The lower return takes into account the tremendous loss the market took in 2008." https://www.creditdonkey.com/average-stock-market-return.htm... (question 2)

Re: Instagram’s Co-Founders Said to Step Down from Company

#226
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 90% of the posts are garbage spam that takes the form of meme/image mace hybrid abominations designed to get likes. IG is like twitter in that the more effort you put in to curate the people you follow, the more rewarding your timeline is. I never look at Explore, but I look at the pictures in my own timeline and enjoy them.

My instagram feed is filled almost exclusively with cat photos, its a good time kill...

"Cat photos"? Right...

Re: Instagram’s Co-Founders Said to Step Down from Company

#227
post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No programmer working at A-list Bay Area companies should be earning so little that a 1 bedroom anywhere needs to be 50% of their gross income. 1 bedrooms in Mountain View are going for 3-4K/month. No programmers at Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, or Facebook are making less than $100k. Starting salaries (not counting bonuses and RSUs) are between $120k and $150k. NIMBY-ism shovels money towards landlords, no doubt…

Gross pay is almost totally irrelevant, as are RSUs prior to IPO, but to use those numbers: Your top number, 150k, at 30% taxes (roughly expected in this area) gives you 105k. That's 8.75k/month, which is pretty darn close to half of your listed Mountain View price... and Mountain View isn't even the most expensive.

You said “well over 50% of monthly income”, which, in the US, is generally taken to mean gross income, particularly when relating income to housing costs, because of the FHA’s ancient “spend no more than 30% of gross income on housing, or you’re considered cost burdened” rule of thumb.

If you had said “nearly 50% of post-tax salary”, I wouldn’t have quibbled. My point is that no Bay Area programmer living in a conveniently located 1 bedroom is likely to be what the FHA would consider cost burdened, unless they’re working for well below market rate at a startup (and thus are, in my opinion, being exploited by their employer).

Every company I mentioned is public, and RSUs are extremely relevant for total compensation analysis at these companies.

Re: Instagram’s Co-Founders Said to Step Down from Company

#228
post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gross pay is almost totally irrelevant, as are RSUs prior to IPO, but to use those numbers: Your top number, 150k, at 30% taxes (roughly expected in this area) gives you 105k. That's 8.75k/month, which is pretty darn close to half of your listed Mountain View price... and Mountain View isn't even the most expensive.

You said “well over 50% of monthly income”, which, in the US, is generally taken to mean gross income, particularly when relating income to housing costs, because of the FHA’s ancient “spend no more than 30% of gross income on housing, or you’re considered cost burdened” rule of thumb. If you had said “nearly 50% of post-tax salary”, I wouldn’t have quibbled. My point is that no Bay Area programmer living in a conven…

You can't pay rent with pre-tax money, so I don't see how that can in any way be assumed to be related to "% of monthly income" that comes out of net pay.

Maybe it's common in financial circles? But most people I know balance their books based on their take-home, not gross.

Re: Instagram’s Co-Founders Said to Step Down from Company

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ig's content, imo is still way better than Snapchat or whisper or even Facebook. The annoying thing is that ads are extremely obtrusive (this is a new thing). At least on FB the don't occlude your ability to enjoy other content.

Well you must not spend must time on Snapchat, my friend. Literally 50% of the app (the pane to the left) is only your friends. If the content is bad for you, then that is a you problem, not a platform problem. You can't even scroll your IG feed for more than a few minutes (at most) without an ad or "Sponsored Content". Personally, I actually even find some of Snapchat's "For You" section useful as well — I usually o…

Fair. However, I keep getting pushed mostly dailymail and tabloid stuff (possibly because the only person who has added me is the admin), and the UI is terrible and it eats my battery. Instagram is more sensible, at least on those fronts, and doesn't trawl my phone contacts to make suggestions - my fb friends are a far better representation of the sorts of content I'd like to see versus my phone list.

Re: Instagram’s Co-Founders Said to Step Down from Company

#230
post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You said “well over 50% of monthly income”, which, in the US, is generally taken to mean gross income, particularly when relating income to housing costs, because of the FHA’s ancient “spend no more than 30% of gross income on housing, or you’re considered cost burdened” rule of thumb. If you had said “nearly 50% of post-tax salary”, I wouldn’t have quibbled. My point is that no Bay Area programmer living in a conven…

You can't pay rent with pre-tax money, so I don't see how that can in any way be assumed to be related to "% of monthly income" that comes out of net pay. Maybe it's common in financial circles? But most people I know balance their books based on their take-home, not gross.

If I tell you “I make $100,000/year”, do you interpret that statement as “my after tax income is $100k”? Most Americans don’t.

Americans generally talk about income in terms of gross. This is very disorienting for people from cultures where “income” as a solitary noun generally refers to post-tax income, but arguing with culture isn’t likely to be very fruitful.

It is absolutely true that this is rarely useful for making budgeting decisions, because you have to come up with some inaccurate assessment of after tax net, which is especially tricky with simultaneously progressive and regressive income tax regimes like the US system for high earners.

The cultural variation around internalizing taxes is even more obvious for transactional taxes, where most of Europe lists prices inclusive of VAT but the US lists prices before sales tax; the US affection for communicating costs while ignoring tax and then expressing distress when they finally appear is widespread.

It doesn’t sound like we really disagree on much at the object level, here, we’re disagreeing on semantics (and, I suspect, on tone).

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